The Strange Paintings of Nicholas Roerich

On numerous occasions in his "At the Mountains of Madness," H.P. Lovecraft's arctic explorers comment on how the eerie environment reminds them of Nicholas Roerich's strange Asian paintings. To the Lovecraft reader unacquainted with world art history, the Roerich references probably mean nothing. However, Roerich deserves mention, even as a footnote to the works of HPL in this case, as he was a bizarre and talented artist in his own right.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh--his original Russian name--gained worldwide fame for his art, queer Asian wanderings, and spiritual philosophy by his death in 1947. The influences on his artwork came from two primary sources: his active life in Russian and Ukrainian culture, and a tour through Asia in the 1920's, resulting in a sharper turn toward esoteric spiritual philosophies. His upbringing in Russian culture allowed him to capture some incredible fantastic histories on canvass of early Slavic societies, as he imagined them. Pre-Christian Slavic mythologies, and the fantastically drawn dwellings and idols of ancient Slavs are beautiful, mysterious, and slightly unsettling. These soulful Russian-Ukrainian pieces comprised his early career as an artist.


However, it's unlikely H.P. Lovecraft referred to these. Roerich's Asian journey in which he visited Tibet, India, and China, with all the weird religious trappings of those places, inspired him to create later artworks to capture these impressions. A tinge of the fantastic--and sometimes blatant use of it--became even clearer in Roerich's Asian paintings. His imaginative scenes captured the stunning beauty of the real Asian sights he visited, such as the Tibetan mountains and Chinese deserts. Yet, these realistic features were melded into Roerich's epic depictions of figures like Budda and Christ, as well as places like legendary Lhasa.


The Lhasa cityscape, in fact, almost appears to be cubic, set into the backdrop of the great peaks of Tibet. Not unlike the quasi-dead city of the Old Ones encountered in Antarctica, eh? This alone suggests Nicholas Roerich was not only a point of weird reference for Lovecraft's tale, but an inspiration for its imagery. Examining Roerich's other paintings from the 1920's and beyond, which include beauteous mountains and mysterious temples, could lead a person to make a tangle of connections between the Russian fantasy artist and American writer of the weird. Or at least take in artistic marvels that clearly struck Lovecraft with their suggestive power.

Visit Roerich's official gallery here.

-Grim Blogger